You Will Never See Any God: Stories Read Free Page B

watched the heavy sky and the water spilling whitely from the roofs.
    “This river she come up higher than you remember,” Gerber said. “She bring fish.”
    “And muck and trees and god knows what else,” Dahlman said.
    “Ya, trees come across the road. Trees in your bottom field.”
    And Dahlman knew he meant floating dead trees had washed in over the levees, to lie with the rest of the flood muck in the fields.
    “Not big trees,” Gerber said with a tiny gesture of his knotted dark hand. The hand disappeared within his sleeve again like the black foot of a turtle withdrawing into its shell.
    “Animals come out too,” Gerber went on, his voice removed and hollow. “I see lot of rabbits and coons come out of their holes to high ground. Some drown.”
    “The land drowns too in this flood. That is the trouble,” Dahlman said.
    “I see muskrat, but the fur is no good, otherwise I kill them. Muskrats almost drowned from swimming. And one snake, black and all muddy, riding on top of a tree that float by.”
    “A snake?”
    “Ya, the tree float by down there,” pointing towards the river or where the river usually flowed, “and the snake there mad and wet, holding on.” There was a faint wheezing, and Dahlman listened and wondered if old Gerber actually laughed, and he turned to look and saw the old toothless mouth, crimped at the edges and black from mud and tobacco and the motion of the mouth like a turtle’s beak. “That snake mad as hell, not liking the water much, holding on.”
    “No. Most snakes don’t like water. Nothing likes it in flood time.”
    “It was a mad old snake, not a big one, so long . . .”—measuring out eighteen inches between his black turtle hoof hands—“It look up at me as the tree float by. I spit at it.” Again the faint wheezing sound. Dahlman shuddered, from the rain, from the thought of the wet and angry snake riding a tree into his field, from the old man beside him, from his helpless disappointment with everything that spring.
    The wife called for dinner and they went up through the pouring chill rain to the house. Dahlman took off his overshoes and he looked down across the little slope to beyond the barn where the water was dim through the rain. The water had seeped to within one hundred yards of the barn and it spread over the flat land all the way to the river. There was a floating edge of scum, ragged like teeth, all along the cornstalk-littered field, and down there in the water a pair of tree trunks floated dimly and listlessly, like hulks of hippopotamus, only the bulk of trunk showing, and the spiny branches broken or hidden in the rain-mist.
    “Water never reach the farmyard,” Gerber said. “It have to come up twenty feet more before it reach here.”
    Dahlman shook his head at this reassurance, knowing that old Gerber had never worked the land, had given no time to the soil, did not even comprehend the land swallowed by that flood. Dahlman turned abruptly to the door. “Bernice,” he said, “is Gerber’s plate ready?”
    The woman said nothing, only brought the pie tin full of food out and set it on the washing machine on the porch without looking at either of them, and she went in again. Gerber sat down on the old wooden chair and began to eat with his fingers, ignoring the fork Dahlman’s wife always set out. He wheezed to himself and gummed at the food with energy and offered some to thedog, but the dog, still distrustful of Gerber after all the eight years of its life, lifted his rain-wet body and backed away to a distant corner of the porch.
    The old black gums exposed as Gerber grinned at the dog. “Old Gerber gonna eat fish pretty soon. Lot of carp in that field out there; gonna get my spear and get some carp. You be glad to eat from my hand then, old dog. I feed you carp guts, you eat.”
    “Dirty old man,” the wife said when Dahlman went in and closed the door.
    “I know, I know,” Dahlman said wearily. Impatiently he swung about